In the last few months, I have become a carer. It’s not for me to speak about the much-loved person for whom I have the privilege of caring. But I can reflect on my own experience, which is that I am rendered suddenly and unexpectedly static. I have lived in one place, getting up and living and going to bed within the same four walls, occasionally travelling the same half mile to the shops, for the whole autumn.
Up to this point, I have lived more or less in perpetual motion. I have travelled between seasons, from northern winter to southern summer, in a few hours; from latitudes of slanting sunlight, to equatorial regions. On long-haul flights, I would say to the rapidly disappearing sun, ‘See you on the other side of the world’, and circle the planet to greet it again.
But now I am standing still, and the sun, and the seasons are passing over me. And it is mighty strange! Early each morning, I have opened the outside gates to let the early call carers in; and each night, after the evening carers have gone, I go out to lock the same gates.
I have stood still, while the leaves changed and fell; I started in the light of early morning, and the world turned, so that now I open up in pre-dawn darkness. From closing the gate in the lingering warmth of a light evening, I now don coat and hat, to venture out under night time skies. Even the snow has come, silently, to cover the landscape, where it stayed for a while, and then melted away.
And I have not moved. I am held, watching, and waiting.
I know that I am only experiencing what thousands of others do. The care system in Britain is chronically under-funded, and desperately short of staff, and those they have are seriously over-stretched. Each carer has been wonderful, as they dash in, administer a burst of excellent support and advice, and hurry on to the next urgent call.
And I know that this stillness ought to be a gift. It is what the season of Advent is all about. We spend so much of our lives caught up in the dazzle and dizziness of twenty-first century living. If anything, the momentum builds during the Christmas season, rather than diminishing. This year, it is exacerbated by the sudden urgency of the new Covid variant. We are plunged back into uncertainty, again.
A couple of phrases from the carol, ‘O little town of Bethlehem’ have been going through my mind as I greet the stars each morning and night: these are the silent stars that ‘go by’ – yes, they do! – above the deep and dreamless sleep of exhausted humankind; and these are the morning stars that, together, proclaim the holy birth. Above all, in the deep darknesses that beset our lives, ‘shineth the everlasting Light’, illuminating the hopes and fears of all our years, tonight, and tomorrow, and every dark night of our lives.
If you have time (!), pray through the words of that hymn. Open to God the darkness, and silent griefs of your own life: ‘O come to us, abide with us, our Lord Immanuel’.
Janet Wootton